macarthur on church spectatorism

John MacArthur posts another awful yet great article at Pulpit Magazine. This one is on how churches are filling will those who are spectators rather than servants.

That’s why Scripture portrays the church as a body—an organism with many organs (1 Corinthians 12:14), where each member has a unique role (vv. 15-25), and all contribute something important to the life of the body. “And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it” (v. 26).

I can’t read that verse without thinking of Dizzy Dean. He was a Hall-of-Fame baseball pitcher, whose career peaked in the 1930s. His 1934 season has never been excelled by any pitcher in history. Dean won thirty games that year, a feat that hasn’t been repeated since (though Dizzy himself came close, winning 28 games the following year). But in the 1937 All-Star game, he took a hard line drive off his toe, and the toe was broken. It should not have been a career-ending injury, but Dean was rushed back into the lineup before the fracture was completely healed, and he pitched several games favoring the sore toe. That led to an unnatural delivery that seriously injured his pitching arm. The arm never fully recovered. Dizzy Dean’s major-league career was essentially over in four years.

Something similar happens in any church where there are non-functioning members. The active members of the body become overextended, and the effectiveness of the whole body suffers greatly. Even the most insignificant member, like a toe, is designed to play a vital role.

The point is great - if you want people to grasp the Biblical mandate that we are all servants, then we need to treat them this way. Each member is significant and each one has a role. This is exactly Frank Viola's point in that we need to be "one-anothering" each other. Short of that, the body suffers.

Unfortunately MacArthur's prejudices cause him to see this problem in the seeker-sensitive movement as opposed to the truth which is that it is both a cause/effect to the way most are doing church these days. We need a radical change and that doesn't look like the church the way MacArthur would have it. It looks like a variety of gathers in which overall, every member of the community finds and expresses their role in that.

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